OpenAI Commits $750 Billion to Data Centers, Starting With a Georgia Megaproject
The company's infrastructure budget just grew 25%, and its first big move is a natural-gas-heavy campus near Savannah that raises familiar environmental questions.
OpenAI said Wednesday it plans to spend $750 billion on infrastructure through 2030, a 25% jump from the figure it floated earlier this year, according to the Wall Street Journal. The announcement lands as questions swirl around Stargate, OpenAI's flagship data center partnership, which appears to have lost momentum.
The first concrete piece of this new spending plan has a name straight out of a garden catalog: Project Camellia. It's a $20 billion data center campus planned for 1,400 acres northwest of Savannah, Georgia, and it will need a serious amount of electricity to run — at least 3.2 gigawatts, drawn from the local utility, Georgia Power. That generating capacity is expected to come online sometime between 2028 and 2032.
OpenAI says it will cover "the full cost of the infrastructure and electric-service costs" for the site. That commitment isn't purely generous. Georgia's Public Service Commission adopted a rule last year barring utilities from shifting the costs of large new power users — anyone drawing more than 100 megawatts — onto other ratepayers. In exchange for taking on those costs itself, OpenAI is getting a 50% property tax abatement for 15 years from Effingham County, according to the Effingham Herald. Georgia Power has also said OpenAI will agree to cut its power draw by as much as 1 gigawatt during periods of peak grid demand, a flexibility measure that helps the utility manage strain during heat waves or other high-usage stretches.
Where the power will actually come from
Neither OpenAI nor Georgia Power has detailed exactly how Project Camellia will be powered. TechCrunch reached out to both companies for specifics and hadn't received a response as of publication. But regulatory filings offer a strong hint.
In December, the Georgia PSC approved Georgia Power's request to add 9,885 megawatts of new generating capacity, with the utility telling regulators it expects all of that capacity to be under contract by the end of 2026. The OpenAI deal alone would account for roughly a third of that total buildout.
The filings show most of the new capacity will come from natural gas. Georgia Power plans to build or buy about 5.8 gigawatts of gas-fired generation from third parties, and roughly a quarter of that will come from simple-cycle turbines, a less efficient, more polluting type of gas plant typically used for quick bursts of power rather than steady baseload supply. Combined, this buildout will more than double the size of Georgia Power's existing natural gas fleet. The rest of the new capacity is slated to come from grid-scale batteries and solar.
A familiar name on the construction side
Georgia Power expects to start delivering electricity to the site in 2028, but OpenAI hasn't said when the first GPUs will actually be switched on — and there's reason to think that could happen earlier than the power timeline suggests. OpenAI recently hired Brett Mayo to lead its data center construction efforts. Mayo previously worked at xAI, where he oversaw the buildout of the Colossus data center in Memphis, a project known for moving unusually fast.
That speed has come with baggage. Colossus has reportedly damaged local air quality, according to a lawsuit filed by the NAACP and the Southern Environmental Law Center. The suit alleges the facility has been running dozens of natural gas turbines without proper permits, with xAI claiming the equipment is exempt from federal clean air rules.
The parallel is hard to ignore. As OpenAI leans on someone with direct experience building fast-and-loose gas-powered infrastructure, and as Georgia Power's own plans lean heavily on new gas capacity to feed Project Camellia, the same tension that's playing out in Memphis could be headed for the Georgia coast. With OpenAI footing the electricity bill and pocketing a multi-decade tax break in return, the arrangement gives the company enormous influence over how — and how cleanly — its newest data center gets powered. Whether that power comes primarily from gas, batteries, or solar will likely become clearer as construction proceeds and OpenAI's broader $750 billion buildout starts to take shape.
